Hasta La Ideas

Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with publishers ORO Editions to give away copies of a book about British firm Wilkinson Eyre Architects’ cooled conservatories at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore (+ slideshow).

Supernature: how Wilkinson Eyre made a hothouse cool follows the design, construction and completion of the two giant biomes designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects as part of the Gardens by the Bay landscape project.

Located on Singapore’s Marina Bay waterfront, the pair of shell-shaped structures act as huge climate-controlled greenhouses.

The first houses a cool, dry climate for Mediterranean flowers, while the second encloses a cool, moist climate for tropical plants and encompasses a 30-metre man-made waterfall.

The project was awarded the title World Building of the Year 2012 at last year’s World Architecture Festival. Supernature is available to purchase from the ORO Editions website.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Cooled Conservatories” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.

You need to subscribe to our newsletter to have a chance of winning. Sign up here.

Competition closes 21 November 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Here are some further details from ORO Editions:

In 2012 Wilkinson Eyre Architects won World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival for one of the most ambitious cultural projects of recent years – the cooled conservatories at Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay. More recently, the project has won a RIBA International Award and the prestigious Lubetkin Prize. The conservatories are the key built element within the gardens, which were masterplanned by a British-led team following an international design competition in 2006. One of the defining projects of this dynamic world city, Gardens by the Bay sets out to reinforce a vision of Singapore as a “City in a Garden”, bringing species from some of the world’s most vulnerable climate zones to the Marina Bay waterfront. A major tourist destination, the site has attracted over 3 million visitors in its first year of opening.

The extraordinary conservatories cover an area in excess of 20,000 square meters and are among the largest climate-controlled glasshouses in the world, comprising a 1.28-hectare cool, dry biome (the Flower Dome) and a 0.73-hectare cool, moist biome (the Cloud Forest). Together they represent a uniquely collaborative approach to design, bringing together scientific and design disciplines to meet the challenge of creating cool growing conditions in a building typology more frequently used to produce a warm environment for plants.

Supernature tells Wilkinson Eyre’s story of the design, describing in detail the challenges of delivering this highly technical and culturally significant project, and following the team through the early conceptual design stages and construction process to the project’s final completion. It also includes an architectural critique of the building and essays placing the project in the context of Wilkinson Eyre’s wider portfolio.

The post Competition: five books about Wilkinson
Eyre’s cooled conservatories to be won appeared first on Dezeen.

A museum housing sixteenth century Tudor warship the Mary Rose opens today in an elliptical timber-clad building designed by London office Wilkinson Eyre Architects (+ slideshow).

Located in the historic dockyard of Portsmouth, England, the Mary Rose Museum displays part of the ship that served the navy of King Henry VIII for 33 years before spending 437 years undiscovered at the bottom of the sea.

Wilkinson Eyre Architects designed the museum with a stained black exterior, intended to reference traditional English boat sheds, and a disc-shaped metal roof that curves up over its elliptical body.

The starboard section of the ship’s hull is housed in a temperature-controlled chamber at the heart of the building and can be viewed through internal windows on three different storeys.

The interiors, by London firm Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will, were designed to recreate the dark and claustrophobic atmosphere found below a ship’s deck.

“We designed a museum that would recreate the experience of being on board the ship hundreds of years ago and created a context gallery to highlight its precious contents,” said studio principal Chris Brandon.

Spaces feature low ceilings and are kept deliberately dark, with lighting directed only onto exhibits and handrails so that visitors can find their way through the galleries.

Two smaller extensions branch out from the sides of the museum. The first accommodates a reception, cafe and shop, while the second contains an education centre.

Wilkinson Eyre Architects was the recipient of last year’s World Building of the Year prize for its role in the Gardens by the Bay tropical garden in Singapore. The firm also recently won a competition to design a skyscraper on Sydney’s harbourfront.

See more architecture by Wilkinson Eyre Architects »
See more museums on Dezeen »

Photography is by Richard Chivers.

Here’s some more information from the design team:

Award-winning architects bring the Mary Rose back to life and create a new centrepiece for Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard

The design of the new £27m Mary Rose Museum – by Wilkinson Eyre Architects (architect and design team leader) and Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will (architect for the interior) – is a story of collaboration, with the project team combining delicate conservation, contemporary architecture and specialist technical expertise. The result is a truly unique design that reveals the secrets of the famous Tudor ship, marking 30 years since the hull of the Mary Rose was raised from the Solent where she lay undiscovered for 437 years.

Like crafting a jewellery box to house a precious gem, the design team has together created a building and interior that protects and showcases the Mary Rose. Designed from the inside-out, the Museum building takes many of its cues from the historic ship, allowing its hull, artefacts and exhibitions to take centre stage and create a visitor experience befitting this remarkable piece of history.

At the heart of the project, within a carefully controlled ‘hot box’ environment, is the starboard section of the hull of the Mary Rose. Alongside it, a virtual port-side hull has been created over three levels to view the ship and house the context gallery. Encasing the Mary Rose and the largest collection of Tudor artefacts in the world is an architectural form that alludes to the historic significance of the Museum’s collection and announces the arrival of a major new cultural attraction.

Chris Wilkinson, Founding Director at Wilkinson Eyre Architects, said: “When you have a treasure like the Mary Rose, which continues to capture the world’s imagination, the architecture of the building takes a supporting role. However, the building has a very significant part to play in projecting the Museum and its remarkable collection to the world, creating intrigue and heightening the visitor experience of this major cultural attraction.”

Chris Brandon, Principal of Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will (PBP+W), said: “This museum is unique – the only one in the world to take its inspiration from the archaeological finds of the Mary Rose and the ship herself. Our role was to create a showcase for The Mary Rose and her artefacts befitting their significance, so we designed a museum that would recreate the experience of being on board the ship hundreds of years ago and created a context gallery to highlight its precious contents. Coming from a marine archaeological background, finally I can unite my two passions in life – architecture and marine archaeology. I hope visitors to the Mary Rose Museum are as excited by the end result as I am.”

The architecture

When working with such a fascinating artefact like the Mary Rose, the architecture needs to complement rather than distract. In this case, the challenge was finding the right architectural language to help articulate the story being told by the Museum, whilst adding a confident piece of contemporary architecture to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

The simple, pure elliptical form of the new building is derived from toroidal geometry echoing the shape of the Mary Rose; its timber is reminiscent of the ship’s historic hull, showcasing the innovative Carvel construction methods of the 16th Century. Further embedding the building in its maritime heritage, the timber has been stained black to reflect England’s vernacular boat shed architecture. ­­

The challenges of the site’s historic context, adjacent to HMS Victory and the listed Admiralty buildings, are compounded by the nature of the site itself: a late 18th Century Dry Dock that is listed as a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Care has been taken to keep the height of the Museum as low as possible to remain sensitive to the proportions and scale of the surrounding buildings. The low-profile, shell-shaped metal roof follows this logic and reduces the internal volume of space which has to be environmentally controlled to precise standards to ensure the conservation of the hull.

Two rectangular pavilions are attached to each side of the main building, one housing the main entrance reception, café and shop, and the other occupied by the Learning Centre and main plant room. The overall composition is a piece of contemporary architecture, an elegantly simple form with an air of mystery that encourages visitors to enter and explore.

The interior

The essence of the design of the interior evolved from the frozen moment in time seconds before the Mary Rose capsized and sank on 19th July 1545. Following the painstaking archaeological excavation and recording of the exact location of every find, the project team could see inside the Mary Rose and reunite the original contents – fittings, weaponry, armament and possessions – deck-by-deck.

A virtual hull was constructed to represent the missing port side with all the guns on their original gun carriages, cannonballs, gun furniture, stores, chests, rope and rigging. Visitors to the Museum walk in between the conserved starboard section of the hull and the virtual hull on three levels, seeing all the main shipboard material in context as though they are on board the Mary Rose. The end galleries then interpret the context gallery deck-by-deck in more conventional museum display cases, designed by Land Design Studio.

The atmosphere of being on the ship is further enhanced by the walkways following the shape of the deck from stern to bow and low ceilings on the lower deck. The Museum spaces are deliberately dark with daylight excluded and the only lighting either focused on the objects or concealed under the walkway handrail, lighting the space and re-creating the dark claustrophobic spaces below decks.

Two museum interiors have been designed – the first for 2013 to 2017/18 and the second for the period after 2018. Initially the Mary Rose will remain in her protective cocoon while she is dried and be seen through windows on the three levels of the context gallery and the lifts. However, on completion of the conservation process, the context gallery walkways will be opened and the Mary Rose and all her contents will be seen together.

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and Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will appeared first on Dezeen.

World Architecture Festival 2012: in our final movie from the World Architecture Festival we take another look at the World Building of the Year, Gardens by the Bay, as Wilkinson Eyre Architects’ Paul Baker explains how the design team used vertical planting to create “some real drama in a very flat landscape.”

Officially the award was given to the architects for the cooled conservatories at Bay South, but at the ceremony director Paul Finch explained that they wanted to recognise the whole team that worked on the enormous tropical garden in Singapore, which also features tree-like towers covered in climbing plants.

“One of the rather amazing things about Singapore is that things do grow,” says Baker, discussing these vertical gardens. He explains how around the world vertical planting requires “a lot of irrigation and a lot of work” but in this project they could easily “put things in the air and get them to survive”.

Bay South is the largest and first to complete of three landscaped gardens at the 100-hectare Gardens by the Bay site, which is sited on reclaimed land that had been a park before. Baker discusses how the government took a “brave decision” to keep the area as a large park, which in turn “increased the commercial value” of land at the perimeter. “I think they had some very good foresighted thoughts about how to make this a special place,” he says.

Read more about Gardens by the Bay in our earlier story. You can also watch our interview with Baker just after receiving the award, or hear more about the project from architect Chris Wilkinson.

We’ve published a series of interviews with award winners at the World Architecture Festival. See all the movies, plus more stories about WAF 2012.

Photography is by Craig Sheppard.

The post We wanted “real drama in a flat landscape”
– Paul Baker on Gardens by the Bay appeared first on Dezeen.

World Architecture Festival 2012: the Cooled Conservatories designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects at the Gardens by the Bay tropical garden in Singapore have been awarded the World Building of the Year prize at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore.

Completed earlier this year, the two shell-shaped structures are the largest climate-controlled greenhouses in the world and form part of Bay South, the largest and first to complete of three gardens at the 101-hectare site beside the marina in downtown Singapore.

One of the conservatories accommodates flowers from Mediterranean regions, while the other is filled with tropical plants and a 30-metre-high man-made waterfall.

Read more about the project in our earlier story.

Dezeen is media partner for the World Architecture Festival, which is taking place at the Marina Bay Sands hotel and conference centre right next to the winning Gardens by the Bay. Find out more about all the category winners from day one and day two in our earlier stories.

You can also follow all our coverage here, including a series of movies we filmed with programme director Paul Finch in the build-up to the event.

Photography is by Craig Sheppard.

The post World Building of the Year
winner announced appeared first on Dezeen.

These reconstituted-stone sails belong to the second museum we’ve featured this month dedicated to ill-fated liner the RMS Titanic, following one shaped like four hulls.

Designed by British architects Wilkinson Eyre, the museum occupies a former magistrates court in Southampton, England, which is where the ship famously set sail from 100 years ago this month.

A strip of glazing connects the existing building to the new north wing, which accommodates special exhibitions and has its own separate entrance.

The main entrance leads into the heart of the old courthouse. Here a red oxide wall references the anti-foul paint used on the Titanic and a skylight frames the view from a first-floor bridge to a clock tower that is roughly the same height as the ship’s original funnel.

Courtrooms are refurbished as exhibition halls, while elsewhere former prison cells are converted into toilet facilities.

Read about the other Titanic-themed museum in our earlier story, or see more projects by Wilkinson Eyre Architects here.

Photography is by Luke Hayes.

Here’s some more information from Wilkinson Eyre Architects:

The SeaCity Museum, Southampton, set to open on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s departure from the city

Wilkinson Eyre Architects has unveiled images of Southampton City Council’s new SeaCity Museum that is to open on April 10th 2012, exactly a century after the RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton. The design for the £15m museum, which has refurbished and extended one of city’s most important civic buildings, will tell the largely untold and fascinating story of the crew on board the Titanic and the impact the sinking of the world’s most famous ship had on families in Southampton. The Museum will also feature other exhibitions about the city’s maritime past and present, telling the stories of people who have arrived and departed in the port over the past 2,000 years.

The project’s architectural brief was to reinvigorate the existing Grade II* listed Magistrates’ Court building, which includes courtrooms and cell block, to create 2000 sq m of exhibition and learning space. Plans also included the addition of a pavilion, which signals the presence of a new important cultural attraction within the city, and has taken the form of a bold architectural addition connected to the north façade of the existing building.

Designing the visitor experience

The Magistrates’ Court building forms part of a complex, collectively known as the Civic Centre, which was designed by E. Berry Webber and represents one of the most important 1930s buildings of its type in the south of England. On entering the building, visitors move into the foyer that provides orientation and connectivity between the two principal levels of the building and opens to the dramatic newly-refurbished Grand Hall.

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The main entrance space provides access to the ground floor, where the ticketing, shop and cafe are located. This is adjoined by a triple height light well that has been formed by enclosing a former prisoners’ exercise yard. A continuous red oxide wall, which recalls the antifoul paint of the Titanic, links the entrance space, light well and pavilion’s lobby, and has been designed to help visitors navigate the different spaces.

Click above for larger image

A bridge spans across the northern end of the light well, acting as a ‘gangway’ for visitors within the Titanic exhibition. Above the bridge, a roof light frames views of the clock tower;  as the height from the light well to the tower is approximately the same height as the Titanic’s funnel, this design feature gives the impression of the scale of the ship.

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The design for the SeaCity Museum remains sensitive to the existing characteristics of the building and uses the qualities of these restored spaces to enhance the visitor experience. Significant adaptations of the Grade II* listed building, which have been done in close consultation with English Heritage, include the transformation of the court rooms into exhibition spaces, plus the restoration of the original prison cells into toilet facilities and also the refurbishment of the original steel frame of the building.

Click above for larger image

The pavilion

A simple material palette of glass and reconstituted stone has been used to make sensitive, contemporary additions to the existing building, including glazed roof extensions and a new single storey pavilion connected to the northern façade of the existing building. The pavilion is linked to the Magistrates’ Court building via a glazed link, designed to act as an independent entrance into the extension if required.

The pavilion’s geometric design negotiates an irregular site where the ground rises two metres from south to north. As a result, the structure – which takes the form of three interlocking bays rising in parallel with the ground – corresponds to the surrounding buildings whilst making a bold architectural statement.  The façades are formed of reconstituted stone precast panels and translucent, backlit reinforced glass panels, allowing for natural light to reach the interior spaces. The use of stone aggregate also ensures that the exterior of the pavilion is consistent with the architectural style of the Magistrates’ Court building.

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Anna Woodeson, Associate at Wilkinson Eyre Architects, said: “We are delighted with the finished museum, which brings a new lease of life to a very important building in Southampton, whilst also announcing the arrival of a new cultural attraction with the addition of the pavilion. These new spaces will play a key role in helping Southampton tell its fascinating maritime story.”

Wilkinson Eyre Architects also designed the landscaping that surrounds the museum, creating green areas and a new grey granite pedestrian path that connects the SeaCity Museum toSouthampton’s City Centre.